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About me according to one of the grad students. "Every time he looks at an Overleaf document, a small piece of him dies."
"Science progresses one funeral at a time" - a paraphrasing of Planck (1950). This insightful observation also applies to administrators of the scientific enterprise.
“When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.” Eric Cantona (1995)
How journals like Nature, Cell and Science are damaging science (2013)
(Picasso-themed sketches courtesy of gemini@google
My scientific interests are adjacent to research assessment; referred to as "meta-research" by some, "science of science" by others, and "scientometrics" by still others. I'd say that my work partially overlaps with these categories.
Before academia, I worked in industry, and even before that, in the federal government. While working at NIH (federal government) I became progressively interested in using data at scale to examine the scientific enterprise.
My PhD research examined signaling by the low affinity Fcγ receptor on human platelets and was performed in the laboratory of Clark Anderson, MD. For a while after, I worked on proximal signaling by antigen receptors and eventually decided to find new grazing pastures.
I have two jobs at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, One as research faculty in computer science. I also run a research analytics unit for the Grainger College of Engineering. The two roles complement each other although time will tell whether either have had broad impact. My work has been supported by awards from the National Institutes of Health, the US National Science Foundation, private foundations, and industry. At present, we are supported by an award from the Illinois:Insper Partnership and a grant from the NSF.
While in biology, I was fortunate to interact with a few outstanding researchers whose influence on me is evident even today. Particularly Clark Anderson and Andrew Chan but about a dozen 'inspirational others' have been influential in various ways. Predictably, I also encountered a few unprincipled types who marked the other end of the spectrum. This calibrated experience awakened an interest in scientific misconduct and the health of the enterprise in its mostly symbiotic relationship with society.
Accordingly, my research is approximately bounded by computer science, informatics, scientometrics, the history of science, biomedical research, philosophy, and sociology. The ideas of the Kuhnian research community, center-periphery structure observed by Price and Beaver, and community detection in graphs come together- in a 'computer-sciency' sense- in my work . The overarching research question is the structure of the global scientific enterprise- both data and people. I am also interested in epistemic and post-epistemic misconduct- no shortage of case studies there. Recently, we've begun to work on an agent-based modeling project of citation dynamics. Other active projects concern community detection and the generation of realistic synthetic networks at scale.
My principal collaborator is Tandy Warnow, also at Illinois. In this collaboration, we combine common and complementary interests in theory, methods development, and discovery. I also collaborate with David Bader from NJIT, Ananth Grama from Purdue, and Pablo Robles Granda from Illinois.
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